Character, map and music design

Well into week 6 our team is making progress in the creation of 2 maps one that will be used in the stage were our character will be on foot and one that will be used when our character is flying. tIDE engine is extremely helpful and straight forward.

Our character design is moving forward. With the help of a fellow student Styliana and professor Tasos Anastasiades we are setting up our characters with a pixar triangular look, and an outfit that is appealing to the children like the one of Dora the explorer. The characters will then be converted to sprites in order to import them in our tiDE engine and afterwards in XNA.

Programming wise we are struggling with finding a solution to our collision detection problem but we are not far away from achieving this. We are hoping that until the end of the next week we will have a fully playable demo that we can test and see what we need to, what we need to fix and how we will continue from there on.

In a different aspect we are also working on the music accompaniment of the game. We are still working on the different styles and approaches that we can take in order to convey the emotions we want to the kids. The music should be enjoyfull and suspenseful were needed.

On Friday 9th Mrs. Vasiliki Folia which is associated with the physiotherapy department will come and talk to us about the kids, and help us understand in more depth what moves will implement in the kinect, and how easy or hard it is for the children to move and do certain movements. We have to understand that due to their limited motor skills we have to approach the game design differently.

Each stage will prompt the player to use a certain amount of moves in order for him or her to be able to complete the stage. The speed of the game will be adjustable, either by categories like easy, medium, and hard or by having the user input their preferable speed as a variable. After the player succeeds in completing all the moves required for a certain stage then he will move on to the next one.

To summarize this past week was about working and fixing collision detection, creating playable and attractive maps, figuring out how to make our characters likable to the children an how the music will be fit to accompany the game. With no hesitation we move through the next week and little by little completing a small piece of the game.